• Ngamba to become first refugee athlete to box for Olympic gold
• 26-year-old becomes first to earn spot through qualifying

The British-based boxer Cindy Ngamba has been tipped to become the first athlete to win a medal for the International Olympic Committee’s refugee team after qualifying for the Paris Olympics this summer.

Ngamba, 26, was born in Cameroon but moved to England 15 years ago. GB Boxing wanted to pick her for their Olympic squad, but were unable to because she does not have a British passport. Instead Ngamba qualified for the IOC refugee team by winning a tournament in Italy last month and was officially named among the 36 athletes to compete under its banner on Thursday. She is the first refugee athlete to make the Olympics boxing tournament, and the first in any sport to earn a place in the Games by qualification rather than selection.

The population of El Fasher, which includes thousands of displaced people, is in ‘dire need of food, medicine and water’

Water, food and fuel supplies for people in the largest city in the Darfur region of Sudan are being choked off as fighting intensifies, according to reports.

El Fasher has been encircled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group over recent weeks, besieging the population as well as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and allied militias.

Shocked people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria herded on to coaches as 200 tents removed and streets cleaned

The convoy arrived just after sunrise, a stream of police vehicles, council trucks, mounted cranes and coaches, ready to dismantle a tent city of migrants and refugees in the heart of Dublin that had become too big, too visible, too political.

They fenced off streets and herded shocked, sleepy men from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other countries on to buses and began to extirpate about 200 tents, gradually extinguishing all traces of the camp, but no amount of sweeping and hosing could remove the whiff of elections and diplomacy gone wrong.

Business secretary defends move, saying it ‘puts to bed myth that Rwanda is not a safe place’

Good morning. When the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill was in the House of Lords before Easter, a mysterious delay crept in. There was plenty of time to get it passed before the Easter recess, but the government held it back, without giving a good reason, and even when parliament returned, the government did not make passing the law a matter of urgency. It only cleared parliament, and got royal assent, last week.

And now it is fairly clear why. With the bill on the statute book, we are seeing a flurry of Rwanda-related activity from the government – which, by miraculous coincidence, seems to be turning up in the papers just days and hours before people in England vote in the local elections.

The Tories are so desperate to get any flight off to Rwanda before the local elections that they have now just paid someone to go.

British taxpayers aren’t just forking out £3,000 for a volunteer to board a plane, they are also paying Rwanda to provide him with free board and lodgings for the next five years. This extortionate pre-election gimmick is likely to be costing on average £2m per person.

This is cynical nonsense from a Conservative party that is about to take a drubbing at the local elections. Paying someone to go to Rwanda highlights just how much of a gimmick and farce their plan is.

This is somebody who has actually volunteered to go to Rwanda, which puts to bed this nonsensical myth that Rwanda was not a safe place.

It is. People go on holiday there. I know somebody who’s having a very lovely gap year there. We need to move past a lot of those myths, which are actually just disparaging about an African country.

There is no cost free option, that is the truth of it. It’s better this way than for him to be in the UK, either claiming benefits or being entitled to things that other people in this country can’t have, which be much more expensive for the taxpayer. But there is no free way to police our borders.

Accused were arrested in Lesbos and accused of facilitating illegal entry of migrants into the country

A Greek court’s decision to drop criminal charges against dozens of international aid workers accused of espionage and facilitating the illegal entry of migrants into the country has been met with jubilation.

A three-member judicial council convening on the north Aegean isle of Lesbos ruled there was insufficient proof to pursue the case against 35 mostly German nationals.

Supporters of the Rwanda deportation scheme fail to understand the lessons of Australia

‘It underscores why you need a deterrent.” So claimed Rishi Sunak in response to the Channel tragedy last week that led to the deaths of five migrants off the coast of France, hours after the “ Safety of Rwanda Bill ”, Sunak’s “deterrent”, passed its final parliamentary hurdle.

“Deterrence” has become the magic word to ease through every immigration policy, however cynical, cruel or unworkable. There is only one problem. When it comes to immigration, deterrence does not deter. “The available evidence suggests that the deterrent effect of asylum policies tends to be small,” observes Oxford University’s Migration Observatory . However tough they may seem, concluded a study from the development thinktank ODI, “deterrent policies… have virtually no effect on people’s behaviour ”. Those seeking to cross the Channel “have already travelled thousands of miles and spent thousands of pounds getting to that point”; they are “unlikely to drastically rethink their ‘migration project’, regardless of how strict the UK’s border controls become”.

Activists say little has changed in treatment of migrants and refugees under Donald Tusk’s new government

The case of a woman from Eritrea who was forced to give birth alone in the forested border area between Poland and Belarus has raised questions about the new Polish government’s response to the continuing humanitarian crisis at the border between the two countries.

The previous, rightwing government of the Law and Justice party (PiS) used the migration issue to score political points and was accused of encouraging rights abuses by guards along the border, with reports of frequent violent “pushbacks” of people to Belarus.

Peers pass four amendments inserting safeguards into bill, including exempting migrants who helped British troops

Good morning. It is now more than five months since Rishi Sunak promised “emergency” legislation to address the supreme court judgment saying the government’s Rwanda deportation policy was unlawful. It has not proceeded at the pace of normal emergency legislation, but the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill is now expected to clear parliament within the next 24/36 hours, and it should become law by the end of the week. (It does not became law until the king grants royal assent, and it can take a few hours to get Charles to sign the relevant bit of paper.)

But before parliamentary officials can send the bill to the Palace, the Commons and the Lords have to agree, and there are still four outstanding issues unresolved. Last night peers passed four amendments inserting safeguards into the bill. They would:

The problem is, we have no evidence that Rwanda is safe. All the evidence that is put before us demonstrates that at the moment it is not. The supreme court said in November it wasn’t safe. We signed a treaty with Rwanda which was supposed to remedy the defects, and this Act will come into force when the treaty comes into force. But even the treaty itself accepts that signing the treaty doesn’t make Rwanda safe.

All this amendment would say is that, instead of us in parliament in London being expected to assert in legislation that Rwanda is safe, when the evidence is including, from the government itself last night, that it isn’t currently safe, it’s a work in progress – instead of having to sign up to that untruth, the government would invite the monitoring committee to certify that Rwanda is safe and when it is safe, the flights can begin.

And should by any chance Rwanda ever cease to be a safe country, well the monitoring committee should say that as well.

Two endurance sailors’ perilous voyage is supposed to lead them to empathy for refugees’ plight – but they sure take their time discovering that

Here is a well-intentioned but brief, unsatisfying and oddly structured documentary, supposedly about refugees and boat people … although the refugees’ experiences are only discussed in the final 10 minutes or so. The film is actually about two Egyptians, Omar Nour and Omar Samra, energetic and prosperous young entrepreneurs who in 2017, in a spirit of adventure, took on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, a well-established annual endurance event with a good safety record in which participants journey in a rowing boat across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua; it is a 3,000-nautical-mile, 40-day ordeal in treacherous seas.

After just nine days, these two guys got into terrible difficulties, perhaps as a result of their relative inexperience. Their craft capsized and they had to be dragged out of the water by a Greek cargo ship, a chaotic rescue that itself could have gone fatally wrong. It all sounds very tense, although as the two men are here being interviewed after the event, we know that they survived. So what was the point of this fiasco? Did they put their families and friends through an agony of worry, just for a macho ego trip? Well, around an hour in to this 70-minute film they tell us that they now appreciate the sufferings of boat people and refugees – some of whose testimonies are duly tacked on to the end of the film.